Chapter Fourteen #2
‘She’s wrong about me and Julia.’ Dan is ashen now. ‘I don’t control Julia: I couldn’t. She’s—’ He halts, obviously at a loss for words. ‘She’s a force of nature – I love
her so much. We need time apart because she’s been so stressed …’
Rose lets him catch his breath.
‘Dan, I know this will be difficult but can you tell me what happened the last time Julia tried to commit suicide?’ Rose asks gently.
‘Obviously, I wasn’t there when she did it,’ Dan says brokenly. ‘That rips me apart. That she needed me and I wasn’t there for her.’
Rose simply nods.
‘She phoned me, told me what she’d done, that she was on her own and then hung up. I clicked onto automatic pilot and I called for an ambulance.’
He starts to cry, tears making their way down his lean face. ‘Her cousin Miriam was away, so nobody else would have found Julia in time, nobody else knew what she’d done. Just me. On the phone, she said I’d driven her to it.’
The story is blurted out as if he wants to be sentenced to a hundred lashes for telling it.
Nobody on the sun-filled terrace moves although Rose can see India’s hand reach out as if she’s flattening a desire to pat Dan’s sinewy arm.
Finally, India makes a decision and, for a brief moment, she pats Dan’s arm comfortingly, then whips her hand back.
The women in the group look deeply sad at seeing Dan so distraught.
Bernard’s expression doesn’t change, Rose notes. Interesting.
‘Did you go to the hospital to see her?’ she asks Dan.
He nods.
‘She needed me, she’d rung me to tell me what she’d done. They wouldn’t let me in at first but I said I was her fiancé.’ Dan looks at the rest of the people as if ashamed of this lie. ‘I’d asked her to marry me years before so it was almost true, wasn’t it?’
‘How do you feel about that day now, months later?’ Rose asks.
‘All I can think of is the blood. That I should have done more for her, that I could have stopped her doing it,’ he says.
He’s staring into space, his entire being has time travelled to a hospital casualty department.
Rose keeps silent. She feels such pity for the unknown Julia and for Dan too.
Finally, he closes his eyes. He’s still crying.
‘She was on a trolley in a cubicle, wearing a white dress, a smock thing, not like she usually wears, she likes clinging things, silvery and gold clothes – sorry. That’s irrelevant. There was blood. Her blood. Everywhere.’
Dan’s voice catches at the memory.
‘She’s always so – I don’t know – glowing? In the hospital, she looked as if she was already dead.’
Both India and Keera look horrified.
Dan opens his eyes now. He looks around at them all earnestly.
‘Julia’s really beautiful. She’s always the most beautiful woman in any room. A doctor was examining her wrist to see if she needed surgery. I wanted him gone so I could tell her it was my fault, that I’d help her, fix her, that we were destined to be together.’
India reaches out and pats his arm again.
‘Why do you think it was your fault?’ Rose asks these questions in a low, hypnotic tone so as not to break the spell.
Dan’s eyes are distraught.
‘Because she said so. I hadn’t been there for her when she needed me. If I’d been there, she’d have never done it.’
Keera rushes into the silence.
‘Nobody can make anybody else want to kill themselves,’ she protests. ‘People choose what they want to do, even something like suicide. Trust me, I know that. It wasn’t your fault, Dan.’
Keera’s eyes are welling up.
‘Julia is her own person, Dan. Sometimes people are so broken that they don’t want to exist any more but can anyone else stop them?’
Dan blinks at this information.
‘You don’t understand,’ he says impatiently. ‘Julia loves life, she’s so vibrant.’
‘If you think it was your fault, what do you think you can do to make sure Julia never tries this again?’ asks Rose.
‘I could be there …’ he says, trailing off.
‘Twenty-four-seven?’ asks Rose. ‘In co-dependent relationships, one person can be very focused on people-pleasing.
That person is terrified of being criticised or rejected, so they try harder and harder to avoid conflict. They enable the other person’s behaviour, make excuses for them.’
Dan looks deeply uncomfortable.
‘They worry that if they don’t take care of their person, something bad will happen.’
Keera gets Dan some water and he drinks it.
‘Why did she break off the engagement?’ asks India. ‘I mean, sorry for interrupting, but if she wants to be with you, she’d be with you, right?’
Keera chimes in: ‘I had a friend who overdosed once. By mistake, I think, because she was in emotional pain and she was doing a lot of drugs at the time. It wasn’t intentional.
She survived and she didn’t blame anyone else.
Nobody pushed that combo of stuff down her throat. Nobody could have stopped her.’
Keera shrugs at Rose. ‘Sorry – does that sound cruel?’
Rose shakes her head.
‘She sounds unstable to me, this girl,’ adds Grazia, shrugging her elegant shoulders and opening the Dior handbag to extract a gold cigarette case. ‘She wants to blame other people for her problems. This you cannot do.’
Dan is drinking his water not speaking or looking at anyone.
Grazia proceeds to pull out the cigarette case and a lighter that is studded with diamonds.
‘No smoking,’ Rose says cheerfully.
Grazia narrows her eyes. ‘Pah,’ she says, shrugging her slim shoulders. ‘We are outside.’
‘I don’t care,’ says Rose, still cheerful. ‘The guidelines say no smoking in any of the sessions.’
Grazia can chew nicotine gum or wear patches if she wants to. Read the small print, folks.
‘But—’ says Sir Bernard, possibly trained to speak up if Grazia’s whims are queried.
‘If you wish to smoke, please leave and go to the smoking terrace, behind the pool.’ Rose keeps the ultra-calm in her voice before she delivers the punchline. ‘But if you leave, you can’t come back in till the next break.’
Most rehab places understand that addicts need something to do: chain smoking, chewing gum, eating endless sweets. But this is not rehab. Rose hates cigarette smoke and anything that takes away from the laser-like focus on why they are all here.
Grazia stuffs the cigarette case back into her bag with vigour. She gives Rose a fierce glare, but Rose has been glared at by experts.
She smiles back in a sunny way.
Don’t take me on, honey, her eyes say, blue eyes flashing fire. You will regret it …
‘Dan, can you see any of your behaviour in my description of the co-dependent relationship?’ she asks.
Dan’s lost for words.
His hands come up automatically to run through his dark, swept-back hair. Rose can imagine him in a lab when something goes wrong, hands in hair as he thinks his way out of the problem.
He really is good looking. Doubtless there are women who look longingly at him, but Dan is the faithful type: would only ever have one woman on his radar.
‘How could you have helped Julia?’ Rose prods.
‘I’m not sure,’ he says.
Rose has to keep going. She needs Dan to answer how he could have stopped Julia’s suicide attempt.
‘Perhaps you could have married her?’
Rose throws this out there as a red herring because Dan has already told her this is off the table.
‘No, you see, she doesn’t want to be tied down,’ he says.
India snorts.
India sees more than people would guess, Rose thinks. From India’s application, Rose guesses the young woman has been dismissed as sweet and dippy her whole life. But there’s much more to her than that. What’s holding her back?
‘What do you think Julia wants, what will make her happy?’ Rose says to Dan. They have to move on.
Again, Dan looks lost.
Rose goes in for the final needle-sharp question.
‘Let’s reframe it, Dan. Let’s look at you in this big picture. You look after Julia and always have. But what does Julia do to make you happy? Does she worry about you the way you worry about her? Does the care flow both ways or not?’
‘That’s not how it works—’ says Dan frantically.
Rose gazes candidly at Dan’s earnest face with its dried tears.
‘How it has worked between you in the past is no longer working. I want you to think about this, Dan – if you feel responsible for everything Julia does and if you do anything to keep the peace in your relationship, then that’s a co-dependent relationship.
‘You feel guilt and shame when Julia’s not happy.
You don’t confront her about behaviour you’re uncomfortable with because you’re afraid of rejection.
But Julia is not your project, she’s not yours to fix.
You can’t change her. What you can change is your own behaviours.
You deserve love and care too. But,’ Rose pauses to let it sink in, ‘you’re not getting it, Dan. ’
‘She does love me—’ he protests.
‘Maybe that’s not enough any more,’ Rose says relentlessly. ‘Julia does what she is driven to do and you feel the need to continue taking care of her irrespective of the effect this has on you. When someone you love tries to commit suicide, that takes up all the air in the room.’
Dan nods warily.
‘If Julia’s mental health is the prism through which you look at your relationship, then you are a carer and not a partner.
‘My final point is one for you to think about, Dan, and for everyone else too: is it within our power to change other people?’
Rose knows that people will fight to the death to challenge that point.
People genuinely want to believe that they can change others, that they can make their loved ones see the error of their ways. It’s a hard lesson to learn that they’re wrong.
Dan is watching her, still wary. Keera’s shaking her head sadly, India’s gazing at Rose, while Bernard and Grazia appear to be gathering their things to leave at the mention of the word ‘final’.
Grazia already has her cigarettes out. Dianne is now looking at the lavender bushes behind the terrace, looking for all the world as if she is not part of the group.
‘Or do we have to accept that we can’t change other people and that we can only change our behaviour to them? What they do is out of our control.
‘I’m going to leave you with that thought.’
Rose rises from her seat and, with a whirl of her flowing dress, is gone.